


Cities Laid Waste

by Sheheisk



Category: Fury (2014)
Genre: Other
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-12-16
Updated: 2019-12-16
Packaged: 2021-02-26 03:09:13
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,350
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21816424
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Sheheisk/pseuds/Sheheisk
Summary: Norman is born twice. The first time is in the regular way, and the second time is in Germany, in the turret of an M4 Sherman, pried out by a team of four combat medics.
Relationships: Don "Wardaddy" Collier/Norman "Machine" Ellison
Comments: 3
Kudos: 54





	Cities Laid Waste

**Author's Note:**

> Contains canon-typical violence, dubious consent, and death.

Norman is born twice. The first time is in the regular way, and the second time is in Germany, in the turret of an M4 Sherman, pried out by a team of four combat medics.

“You’re a hero, buddy,” one of the guys says, patting him on the shoulder.

Norman stares at him; he can barely hear anything over the ringing in his ears, he’s freezing cold, and his fingers are still pruned from laying in the mud.

They take away the .45 and put him in the back of a half-track ambulance and close the door. It’s quiet compared to the inside of the tank. It’s good to be enclosed in metal again; it feels safe. The Fury had been dark and stinking of diesel, cordite and blood, humming to him with the great thrum of her piston-engine heart.

The sky is a blinding white-grey through the dirt-specked window, painfully bright to look at. The truck bumps along over the bodies left in the road.

-

It’s all a mistake, is the thing, just a big fucking mistake from start to finish. He tries to tell them that he’s not supposed to be in their unit, but they just tell him to clean out his new seat, in the tank with FURY spelled out on the big 75mm gun.

He gets to come face-to-face with the man he’s replacing, so to speak.

He thinks about that face a lot. It made no sense that the eye had stayed lodged into the boneless skin of the face. Then again, a lot of things didn’t make sense about the war.

He’d ended up carefully scraping the face off the floor with an empty ration pack’s cardboard, after puking beside the tank, and threw the whole mess in the bushes. Some hero’s burial.

They get orders to move out and he’s given up trying to convince his new sergeant that he’s not supposed to be there. He’s poked out of the bow gunner’s hatch like a gopher, watching the conquered people of Germany struggle past them from his high perch. They’re afraid to look at him. He wants to tell them he’s a clerk, that he’s never killed anyone, that it’s all wrong; but to them, he’s just a uniform in a killing machine.

Norman makes a lot of mistakes on his first day. He doesn’t shoot the Hitler Youth kid and Lt. Parker’s whole tank gets blown up. He thinks about that a lot too, after; Lt. Parker jumping out of the tank, a man on fire, blowing his own brains out.

His new unit hates him. They’re all hard men, and next to them, Norman is acutely aware he is a weak man, a scared kid, that he was born soft and he’s going to die soft. His new sergeant, Collier, scares him the most.

Gordo tries to be kind to him. “I froze up before too,” he says. “You got to kill Krauts. Can you do it?”

“I can do it,” Norman says uncertainly. Gordo’s nice enough not to call him on his shit, nice enough to tell him what he’s doing wrong when he’s doing it.

He learns a few lessons in his first few hours in the tank. Fire short bursts so you don’t burn out the barrel of your gun. Aim high. Turn off your mic if you’re going to have a breakdown on company-wide comms.

He’s honestly surprised when the Sergeant doesn’t beat the shit out of him for back-talking after that; he’d have gotten worst from the drill sergeant back in basic, but Collier just hops out of the Fury. Norman should’ve known worse was coming.

-

Norman doesn’t like to think about shooting the Kraut solider wearing the American greatcoat in the back, but of course he remembers it all in humiliating detail. He remembers begging Collier to kill him in front of the entire company, thinking he’d solved a big problem for everybody. The German could live, they could get a replacement who knew how to be a gunner, and Norman could be free from this mess.

Instead Collier wrestles him to the ground, wraps his own hand around Norman’s hand on the gun, and they shoot the Kraut in the back together.

He gets the Medal of Honor that August, for holding the crossroad. While President Truman is placing it around his neck he wonders if any of the men in the crowd were there at the sugar beet field in Niedersachsen. They’d all watched as Collier slapped him around while he cried and pleaded to be killed, and heckled them when Collier had forced him to the ground and put the gun in his hands.

Norman would understand why they would be confused, seeing him get the medal; he’s confused too. Nothing has seemed real since he came out of the Fury.

The Medal of Honor sits in a box in his attic, the remains of his unit are in boxes buried somewhere outside Verdun, and Norman still remembers exactly how it felt when Collier pressed his big hand around the side of his head and dragged a thumb just outside the corner of his mouth and said, “I’m trying to teach you something, son.”

-

Norman didn’t have sex with Emma. He’d wanted to, he’d been getting hard when they kissed, and he pressed her down in the bed, next to her stuffed dog toy, and he’d realized she was crying, silently, tears rolling down her temples to disappear in her hair, her body gone limp like a rabbit caught in the jaws of a coyote. Her hands lay half-curled and motionless beside her, freezing cold.

He’d sat back up. He was dizzy; everything seemed very far away and small, and his head felt cold and high. His gun was resting on the vanity, an aberration in the soft and floral room, just like him, a man reeking of fear-sweat and gunpower.

He’d almost done it, just because Don Collier had told him to. Almost raped a girl who couldn’t have been more than fifteen, who had no way of fighting back against a man with a gun who’d broken into her home and dragged her, crying, from under the bed.

“Why didn’t you fight back?” he said to her nonsensically. She lay still on the bed, staring at the ceiling, mouth trembling. She’d been keeping it together well, better than he did when Don had forced him to the ground with an arm around his throat and put his hand on the gun, but of course that wasn’t the same thing at all.

When the other men burst into the apartment he knew, knew beyond a shadow of a doubt _,_ that they were going to come back after he and Don had left, and rape her and her cousin. She clung to him when they left, her eyes wide and begging. He wanted to tell her he was going to come back and guard her door with his gun, atone for what he had done to her.

But then it didn’t matter.

Even after he saw the apartment reduced to rubble, he’d thought she was still alive. She was still so pretty, even half-crushed under the bricks; a single line of blood from her nose to under her chin, not at all like the other bodies he’d seen, chopped up. He hoped she’d died quick, that it hadn’t hurt; that she and her cousin had maybe added a dash of schnapps to the last of their coffee and enjoyed the last sips before they were blown to oblivion.

-

The other men joke about fucking constantly. Norman’s ears burn when Coon-ass says Don’s so pretty, can he fuck him, and Don says to grab the grease. He didn’t know they could joke about that; kids got beat up in school for saying less, and anyways, it’s a sin. Norman doesn’t know how to joke along with them, how to hit the right beats, so he doesn’t say anything.

Don has very blue eyes. Norman knows because Don looks at Norman after he says to get the grease, and Norman doesn’t look away.

-

It’s been a fucked-up day, and when the mine blows the tread off Fury, Don offers Norman a Lucky Strike and Norman takes it. They lean against the side of the tank, looking out at the road they just came down, while Coon-ass wrestles with the main drive sprocket and curses. It’s real pretty country out here, in late April, the grass growing green and lush, the trees budding after the long winter.

“After you finish that, head up to that hill as a lookout,” Don says, taking a long drag off his cigarette. Norm copies him; he doesn’t really know how to smoke and holds it in his mouth, coughing a little. Don gives him a quick look, almost indulgent.

“I’m sorry about Emma,” he says. “She seemed like a nice girl.”

Norm looks out at the trees. Emma’s not his to be sorry about. Now that the tank has stopped running, he can hear birds chirping. The only enemies around them are dead; it’s peaceful.

“We didn’t…” Norm begins, and then trails off. 

“What, really? With a girl like that?” Dom’s eyes drop down from his face. “You need me to show you how to do that, too?”

Norman’s body feels too hot, his field uniform suddenly too tight on his body. His cigarette is burning down into a long column of ash. He can picture it all too well, is the thing. He’s a man and a man can’t help but get a little excited at talk like that, is all. And Dom’s a handsome man, scars and all, not that it matters, because this is a joke too, surely.

Dom takes the cigarette from him with a grin and drops it into the mud of the tank treads. Norman can’t look away from him, waiting for him to reveal the joke, or worse, to shove him away, to beat the shit out of him; surely he can tell Norman’s not joking.

“Get to your post, son,” Don says, and it sounds like a promise when he adds, “We get this rust bucket to Berlin, and I’ll teach you how to use that too.”

-

Bible’s a Christian man but Norman thinks he wouldn’t have stopped the other men if they had gone back to find Emma, because he’s a dogmatic man, and women were made submissive to men in the eyes of the Lord. The tank crew is more important than any moral qualms, anyways.

Norman had learned that day that the weak man is subservient to the strong man, that the strong man bows down before the tank, and that above all are the B51 bombers. There’s certain doubts Norman has that a lifetime of Sunday school couldn’t beat out of him, but Bible has the eyes of a righteous man, and the conviction of God behind his words.

“’And I said, Here I am. Send me’,” he quotes, and he gets that shining look in his eyes when Don knows it’s the Book of Isaiah.

Norman’s tempted to finish the verse when he gets the brandy, but he doesn’t want to be an asshole when they’re all about to die, so he just drinks.

-

_Then I said, “Lord, how long?”_

_And He answered,_

_“Until the cities are laid waste and without inhabitant,_

_The houses are without a man,_

_The land is utterly desolate.”_

-

It’s fitting, anyways.

-

There’s a lot that doesn’t make sense about the night. At the end of the fight, when he’s cowering under the tank, one of the German soldiers shines a flashlight full on his face; he’d hid himself poorly, almost hoping that one of them would kill him. It doesn’t make sense that the German just gets up and leaves.

He learns later when he gets assigned to a new tank crew that Sherman hatches can lock from the inside. He mulls that over all the way to Berlin.

The Panzerfaust that killed Coon-ass should have killed them all; he sees what one does to a tank crew near Hamburg. He learns that despite that, the United States Army won’t leave a tank out in the field; they’ve got that one cleaned up and repaired and ready to go in a day. He wonders if that happened to the Fury.

He learns that war is mostly boring. He spends a lot of time staring through his periscope and goes six days without firing a gun. On VE day, he takes a very long nap on the turret of his Sherman while Berlin burns.

After the war, he gets a lot of medals. In 1954 they make a terrible movie about him and the crew called _The Fury of a Righteous Man_. Despite the fact it’s awful, he can’t watch it without having nightmares for weeks. In 1962 he sleeps with a man in New York. Life goes on.

He learns things after the war, too. The specialists tell him that the brain has a way of coping with traumatic memories. For example, three grenades would turn the human body into pulp. He’s glad his brain chose to spare him that. He’s seen a lot of faceless bodies; it’s nice that in his memories, Don just has a couple scratches down the side of his handsome face.

-

The battle is a blur. He comes back to himself as he hides in the turret with Don, who is dying. He got zipped in both shoulders and one looks like it hit an artery. He’s soaked in blood, all the way down to his fingers, still clutched on his gun.

“I want to surrender,” Norman confesses.

“Please don’t,” Don says laconically, eyes half-closed.

There’s a lot Norman wants to say to him, but then the top hatch opens and the Germans drop three potato mashers into the turret. They both stare at them. If the Germans cooked the grenades, they'd both be dead already, but they're not.

Don says, _go_ , so Norman goes.


End file.
